David Coateshttps://www.davidcoates.net
Political Blogger and Author of Answering Back and Making the Progressive Case
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1 Posting…. (3) The Limits of Labour Party Electoralism and the Requirements of Hegemonic Politicshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/ykyOJQ0I01g/
https://www.davidcoates.net/2018/04/12/posting-3-the-limits-of-labour-party-electoralism-and-the-requirements-of-hegemonic-politics/#respondThu, 12 Apr 2018 19:00:07 +0000https://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1685

Across global capitalism as a whole, left-wing forces have become far too accustomed down the years to both impotence and failure. Through the long twentieth century, in country after country and decade after decade, power was invariably something that other political forces possessed and exercised, and that the Left did not. It was power – state power, economic power, and cultural power – against which the Left knew from bitter experience how to mobilize in a defensive manner, but it was power which the Left was rarely if ever in position to deploy as its own.

In the United Kingdom at least, however, that impotence and failure may now be poised to end. For If the current generation of left-wing politicians and activists can work together to forge a politics that is more effective than left-wing politics have proved to be in the past,[1] what now lies before us may well be vital and new twin tasks. Twin tasks, about which the history of the British Left has sadly little directly to teach us: namely the winning of power on a progressive platform, and the implementation of that platform when in power.

It is to that first task – the winning of a parliamentary majority – that this ‘think piece’ is primarily addressed. It is addressed here on a set of linked premises: namely that the political opportunity now before us is real and unique; that in seeking to seize this opportunity, the past is a better guide to failure than to success; and that in consequence the very last thing we need right now, if radicalism in the UK is to prevail at last, is a return to any form of politics of the usual Labourist kind.

THE OPPORTUNITY: SEIZING VICTORY FROM THE DEPTHS OF DEFEAT

If the argument to be developed here has any force, it requires first a recognition that – bad as things appear to be from a progressive point of view, when examining surface developments on either side of the Atlantic – our contemporary moment contains definite progressive possibilities. Why? Because we are suddenly at:

a moment in which politicians of the Centre-Right are increasingly discrediting themselves and their policies in the minds of more-and-more fully educated people in both Washington DC and London;

a moment at which the entire neo-liberal way of running capitalist economies is now being questioned by ever-larger (and ever younger) blocks of potential and actual voters, and;

– most vital of all – a moment in which (for the first time since the Attlee Government) the requirements for a successful regeneration of living standards and job security for the mass and generality of British workers are entirely aligned with the programmes and proposals of the Labour Left.

Jeremy Corbyn, for one, is old enough to bridge the gap between today’s Labour Left and that of the generation before him, the Bennite Left of the early 1980s; so he at least should be in a position to recognize how much more favorable political conditions are now for radical and progressive politics than they were in his youth. For although today’s Labour Party is but a shell of the one that the Bennites faced – one in which unions are weaker and constituency parties thinned by years of New Labour elitism – that very thinning means that the internal party barriers to radicalism are that much less potent than once they were, and that the ease of policy-capture by an influx of new members is now that much greater. This is both a problem for this generation of the Labour Left – consolidating party membership and enhancing trade union power again are tasks facing Jeremy Corbyn and his team that were never faced by the Bennite Left – but it is also an opportunity for them.

Because now, around the shell of today’s Labour Party swirl active social movements linked by new technologies of communication and motivated by problems that were only embryonic a generation before. Climate change, LGBTQ rights, the need for a fairer work-life balance, proper housing, and access to it by a new millennial generation – all these issues and others have a centrality now, and a wide popular base that was largely missing a generation ago when the balance and character of social forces behind the progressive project was qualitatively different and inferior than it is now – currently one in which class position and consciousness is less potent, and personal experience and social identity is stronger. The task of leading a Labour Party committed to qualitative social change is in consequence both easier than in the past – the forces available for mobilization are suddenly plentiful – but also wider, for party leadership now requires more than simply a focus on parliamentary politics and trade union needs alone.

These social movements ‘swirling’ around a Labour Party led by its own left-wing also underscore the presence now of one other critical thing missing a generation ago: namely the generalized discrediting – in the minds of ever wider swathes of thinking people – of neoliberalism as an economic and social project and of western imperialism as the answer to global problems. When the Benn generation took on Old Labour, they were not its only challengers. A confident, untested, and well-financed neoliberal solution to the crisis of Keynesian demand management stood waiting in the wings, and the external order was still frozen into its basic Cold War choice. But not any more: today the shine has come completely off the Thatcherite solution to economic growth and social development, and the golden-opportunity for a peace dividend in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union has been dissipated in the on-going dislocation of the Middle East caused there by the clash of western arms and religious fundamentalism. Popular support for austerity politics and for military interventionism overseas – support that was high across the entire UK electorate in 1979 and 1983 – is now in consequence at a historic low in the UK. (It is even beginning to diminish in the heartland of contemporary imperialism, namely the United States itself.)

The task that ultimately defeated the Bennite Left, a generation ago, was that of stopping the drift to New Labour in an electoral environment in which anti-statism was popular and memories of Margaret Thatcher were strong. The task of the Corbynite-Left, by contrast, though still daunting, is more readily attainable. It is to distance the entire Labour Party from its New Labour dalliance with Thatcherism, and to set the economy and society on a growth-path based on greater social equality rather than on greater austerity. Supporters of Labour’s Blairite past remain entrenched within the Parliamentary Party to slow down the speed of that resetting; but beyond parliamentary circles – in the wider electorate at large – there is a large and growing popular constituency for a progressive realignment of policy and goal, and a growing recognition that deregulated capitalism needs now to be put firmly behind us. That recognition even extends to governing circles within international economic institutions like the IMF – a recognition even there that economic growth globally now requires a greater degree of social equality, and not a further round of trickle-down economics.

For the first time since 1945, that is, the thinking and policy proposals of the Labour Left are beginning to run with – rather than against – the grain of long-term capitalist prosperity. For capitalism needs managing again, even if many of its major advocates have so far failed to recognize this new truth: a management that may yet prove more electorally popular than its neoliberal alternative, and a truth that might yet work to Labour’s long-term electoral advantage.

LEARNING FROM THE PAST: THE LIMITS OF ELECTORALISM

That the debate about how best to manage capitalism is back on the popular agenda gives this generation of left-wing activists an opportunity which their predecessors lacked, and which in consequence they must not waste. But sadly, previous generations of the Labour Left have been very good at just that kind of wasting: each starting when in opposition committed to complete capitalist transformation, only then to end when in power satisfied with merely a modest degree of social reform.

If we do not want to see that slide from high promise to low performance again, if we want to break the cycle of history first as tragedy and then as farce, it is imperative that the entire British Left recognizes – and recognizes well before any radical government takes the reins of power – that the manner in which a Labour Government comes to power is a critical determinant of its ability to sustain its radicalism when in power. And, to put the same point in the medium of time, that the inability of previous Labour Governments to sustain their radicalism when in office was directly related to the nature of the extraordinarily thin relationship established between parliamentarians and their electoral base in the months and years of opposition that divided one period of government from another.

This was very clear even during the years of the Thatcher ascendancy when we first singled out, as a key explanation of Labour failure in power, the mechanistic electoralism that had been so characteristic of Labour politics in each generation prior to that one. Labour in or out of power, as we noted then,[2] never established what could be called – in a Gramscian sense – a hegemonic relationship with its own electoral base. It never created a labour movement in anything other than name. It never even created the network of social-democratic clubs, newspapers and discussion groups whose sustenance had once been such a priority for continental social-democratic parties of the German kind. Instead, of consolidating a strong class movement behind it to sustain it radicalism in office, as other parties had once done, the Labour Party of the past had been satisfied merely to establish an episodic and ephemeral relationship between itself and its people, a relationship wholly mediated through the pursuit and mobilizing of the vote.

And even as an electoral machine, the Party’s presence at grass-roots level throughout the post-Attlee years had lain dormant between elections (and under New Labour continued to lie dormant), only swinging into frenetic activity in the run-up to election day itself. In those moments the Labour Party seemed always to insist – certainly by implication and often explicitly – that the whole task of the Left could and should be reduced to one of door-knocking and vote-catching. But the very fact that the Labour Party, in the vast majority of its constituencies, had not knocked on any doors since the last election tended to mean that fewer doors opened to it, and that doors opened to it with increasing indifference, except in moments of Tory crisis that the Labour Party alone could do little to precipitate. Not surprisingly then, Labour majorities when they came tended to be accidental rather than created, and invariably proved to be as tenuous as they were fortuitous.

Not surprisingly too, with Labour so inactive between elections, even core Labour voters were left exposed generation on generation to the drip-by-drip media-based construction of a conservative, anti-progressive, view of both their private interests and their realistic political options. Democratic electoral politics is ultimately always hegemonic; and it certainly has been in the UK since the years of Margaret Thatcher. Left-wing forces do not defeat the hegemonic politics of the Right by staying silent in the face of that hegemony, or by tacking to the winds of orthodoxy that conservative hegemonic politics call into being. In such a circumstance, left-wing forces defeat the hegemonic politics of the Right only by developing a more convincing hegemonic politics of its own.

These limits of Labourist electoralism have, of course, long been recognized by the best of the Labour Left: so that even today it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel on so vital a strategic issue. On this at least, there is still value in revisiting the recognition of electoralism’s limits by the best voices in each successive generation of socialists within the Labour Party. This, for example, was Tony Benn’s – discussing what in 1972 he termed ‘popular democracy’ – raising issues then that still require urgent consideration now.

Political leaders often seem to be telling us two things: first – “there is nothing you have to do except vote for us”; and second – “if you do vote for us, we can solve your problems.” Both those statements are absolutely and demonstrably false…the historical role of democracy is to allow people to have their way. A real leader will actually welcome the chance to give way to the forces he has encouraged and mobilized by a process of education and persuasion. Legislation is thus the last process in a campaign for change…The people must be helped to understand that they will make little progress unless they are more politically self-reliant and are prepared to organize with others, nearest to them where they work and where they live, to achieve what they want….This is not a wishy-washy appeal for “participation” as a moral duty or “job enrichment” as a management technique, or “involvement” as a Dale Carnegie philosophy of life. It means telling people the truth: if you don’t organize with others to change your life situation, the only change we can guarantee you is the “ins” and “outs” of alternative parties in power. Democratic change starts with a struggle at the bottom and ends with a peaceful parliamentary victory at the top.’ [3]

And if that is not enough to make the point, we can always go back a generation further, to R.H. Tawney and this from 1932.

The great weakness of British Labour…is a lack of a creed. The Labour Party is hesitant in action because divided in mind. It does not achieve what it could because it does not know what it wants. It frets out of office and fumbles in it….If the Labour Party is to tackle its job with some hope of success, it must mobilize behind it a body of conviction as resolute and informed as the opposition in front of it….The way to create [this], and the way, when created, for it to set about its task is not to promise smooth things: support won by such methods is a reed shaken by every wind. It is to ask the question; Who is to be the master? It is to carry through at home the measures of economic and social reconstruction which, to the grave injury of the nation, have been too long postponed…It is not to encourage adherents to ask what they will get from a Labour Government, as though a campaign were a picnic, all beer and sunshine. It is to ask them what they will give. It is to make them understand that the return of a Labour government is merely the first phase of a struggle, the issue of which depends upon themselves.[4]

GOING FORWARD: THE NEED FOR COUNTER-HEGEMONIC POLITICS

If the Tawney/Benn take on the requirements of radical politics is correct, any Corbyn-led coalition of progressive forces now faces a set of distinctive and difficult tasks on which it needs to embark with all due speed and diligence, well ahead of its arrival in power – tasks that need to be addressed now if Labour is ever to overcome first the electoral barriers to its success and then the governmental ones. A set of hegemonic tasks awaits, in the meeting of which all of us need to be centrally involved: ideological tasks – breaking fundamentally with neoliberal orthodoxies and offering a vision of a fully democratized and empowered nation. And programmatic tasks – backing that vision with policy commitments that establish new sets of worker and citizen rights, new partnerships between a democratized state and those currently in control of the levers of state and economic power, and new frameworks of social justice and personal emancipation. For the biggest lesson left to this generation of progressives by the failures of previous generations who shared their values and aspirations is surely this: that unless progressives enter power with a fully mobilized base of committed support, the gap between the promise and the performance of yet another generation of parliamentary socialists will open once most the floodgates of reaction and conservatism.

In the wake of the most recent Labour Party conference, Anthony Barnett put it this way: and he was right.

A government that wishes to replace neoliberalism must offer voters an emboldened form of citizenship that meaningfully enhances their influence. If voters are told, as they will be in the most hysterical fashion by the press and the Tories, that Labour wants to replace their consumer choice with ‘centralized bureaucracy’ voters will prefer ‘choice’. To counter this, Labour will need to propose much more than flaccid tropes such as regional devolution, consultation and decentralization…. {If] they want to use the opportunity of a lifetime to transform economic policy in an egalitarian direction…Labour must now prepare itself in a more far-reaching fashion than its 2017 manifesto sets out, even after incorporating its important linked call for Alternative Models of Ownership which propose ways to democratize the economy. In his speech to conference, Jeremy Corbyn looked forward to Labour replacing neoliberalism. To achieve this demands a hegemonic approach that redefines the nature of the country’s politics, as well as economic policy.’[5]

A decade ago, and writing to an American audience[6], we argued that it was conservative political forces, and not left-wing ones, who fully understood the importance of hegemonic politics in contemporary America – that it was they, not the Left, who spend literally a fortune shaping public opinion by their control of news outlets, opinion makers and policy-focused think tanks. And that they did so (and continue to do so) precisely because they recognized that in modern capitalisms: democratic politics is largely a spectator sport. The crowd gets to play every now and then, but between elections it is largely a matter of watching and listening. More of us tire of that more quickly than we should, probably because – in a world of 24-hour news coverage – words flow in huge numbers, washing over us like summer rain. We get wet; and depending on the colour of the rain, we either like it or we don’t. Political parties are the great rainmakers of the modern age. They package ideas. They put together programmes. They organize blocs of voters. They tell us what is happening – what is going right and what is going wrong. They point a way forward and they provide us with protection against the rain coming from the other side. When they are effective, they provide a narrative linking the private hopes of their supporters to some great national program of reform. They keep their own people dry by the quality of that narrative – by the ability of the arguments and images they deploy to act as an effective umbrella.

If that is so, then it is high-time for a Corbyn-led progressive movement to start creating umbrellas again.

[1] On this, see Hilary Wainwright, ‘A new politics from the Left: the distinctive experience of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the British Labour Party,’ in David Coates (editor), Reflections on the Future of the Left. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, 2017, pp. 95-113; and A New Politics for the Left. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.

On a day-to-day basis, it is hard to break free of a mindset dominated in the UK by the details of the Brexit negotiations or in the United States by the tweeting of an emotionally volatile president. But in both political systems, the normal rhythm of elections fortunately persists – and because it does, mid-term and presidential elections can be dimly seen on the political horizon in America, as can the first series of post-Brexit general elections in the UK. In both political systems, therefore, it is not too soon to begin to ponder the nature of politics, post-Brexit and post-Trump. Nor is it too early to begin pondering the possibilities and problems associated with the rise to political power of a re-energized Centre-Left. Indeed, in relation to this at least, pondering the standard dilemmas of Centre-Left politics is all the more vital now, because if those dilemmas are not addressed well before the event, they will come back to haunt progressive politics in its next iteration – be that either in the UK or in the US. The Left in power has failed too many times for any of us to want to see that failure again.

So, keeping a Corbyn-led Labour Party and a left-leaning Democratic Party firmly in view, the three standard dilemmas that will inevitably beset their politics are worthy of careful consideration this early in the game: the dilemmas of how best to cope with a difficult inheritance when in power, of how best to build out from that inheritance to a better future, and of how best to repel the sustained conservative pushback against that building that necessarily comes with the territory.

Dilemma 1: Climbing Out of Holes.

The greatest single dilemma faced by the majority of Centre-Left governments down the years has been one generated by the tension between the conditions necessary for their electoral victory and those necessary for their success in office. Many such parties have found themselves elected into office only when the economic conditions inherited by them were so difficult that they effectively precluded the easy implementation of progressive programmes. For paradoxically, if economic times are good, parties offering extensive sets of social reform often have difficulty persuading electorates that they are even necessary. And yet when times are bad – and electorates turn away from governing parties of the Right in the hope of something better – the economic surpluses needed to allow the easy funding of extensive social reforms are invariably denuded by the scale and severity of the bad times themselves. Far too often for comfort, in consequence, Centre-Left parties have responded by trying to squeeze one last ounce of growth out of a failing economic system, only to find themselves quickly identified by many of their potential voters as either the cause of that failure, or as too constrained in their critique of it. Either way, as periods of transition between social settlements open-up, parties of the Centre-Left often find themselves seriously tarnished by their involvement in what has immediately gone before – in the 1990s embrace by the Clinton Administration of Reaganite policies on welfare-to-work, for example, or in the later flirtation of New Labour with Thatcherite neoliberalism – flirtations which make it all the more vital, therefore, that if sufficient progressive electoral support is ever to be won again, Centre-Left parties must use their years out of power to make a fundamental break with the practices of their party when last in power. Off with the old, in with the new, while mining the past for lessons for the future – this has to be the fundamental pattern of reflection and change that stands at the very core of effective progressive politics – and yet it is a pattern that is extraordinarily difficult to initiate and sustain in progressive parties whenever a residue of leading figures within the party identify powerfully with the old and feel personally threatened by the new.

Dilemma 2: Bridging Settlements

Such a rupture with the past is all the more important now, however, because both the US and UK economies are currently operating in the shadow of the 2008 collapse of the social settlement ushered in in the 1980s by both Reagan and Thatcher. Both are in consequence in need of a new growth strategy to replace the neoliberal strategy that worked for a while, but which as it collapsed left general living standards blocked and swathes of marginal voters disaffected with the political class as a whole. In that context of transition – between a social settlement that has failed and a new one still needing to be created – Centre-Left political leadership requires highly sophisticated levels of understanding and action. For when a particular social settlement is up and running – as (in the UK) the Attlee settlement was in the 1950s/60s, and the Thatcher one was in the 1980s/1990s – the task before parties of both the Left and the Right becomes simply that of managing the dominant settlement successfully. Politics in those periods becomes largely a matter of marginal differences between parties amid high levels of basic consensus: and as such largely a question of jockeying for positions of leadership within a broad political class that is largely at peace with itself. But in the period of transition between social settlements – of a kind we are living through now – the job of the political class becomes harder. Political leadership then requires some understanding of why the previous settlement failed and how it can best be replaced. Political leadership also requires sufficient agility to design and advocate long-term changes while simultaneously dealing with the fall-out from the collapse of the old ways of organizing the society and running the economy – dealing, that is, with an electorate whose expectations cannot now be met in the old way and who in consequence often feel cheated and let down, even scared and desperate for a return to some imaginary preferable past. In such a period of flux and transition, progressive political leadership requires the capacity to look forward and backwards simultaneously – the capacity to develop and articulate a critique of the old settlement and policy consensus that simultaneously points the way forward to a better settlement and to more progressive and credible set of policy alternatives.

Dilemma 3: Resisting Conservative Push-back

Neither of these dilemmas are easily transcended – nor is this third one – but each is easily reproduced if not recognized and tackled ahead of time. For there is certainly no avoiding dilemma 3: of how best to respond to conservative pushback when radical changes are required. Nor is there any way of escaping the fact that the more radical the progressive programme turns to be, the more pushback it will generate, and the more fear-mongering it will attract. In the UK right now, for example, such a pushback is already well underway – a steady drip of hysterical newspaper articles, for example, pondering which is the greater threat to future UK prosperity: Corbyn or Brexit? While in the US, a daily diet of Fox News is currently keeping the Trump-base on high alert: with each Trump voter ever more convinced by what they hear from a well-orchestrated conservative media message that their Second Amendment Rights are under serious challenge, and that with Sanders will come socialism and Venezuela-type tyranny. Only a powerful and self-confident counter-assertion by progressives themselves can keep that pushback at bay – a counter-assertion that must be anchored in the recognition that this time round (as in 1945), the needs of managed capitalism and those of progressive social reform are moving in the same direction: that only a just social settlement can release the pent-up capacity of workers in both economies to deploy their currently under-utilized skills and capacities, by ensuring that their work is rewarded fairly and that their social needs are prioritized in the design of public policy.

There is no austerity route to renewed prosperity for all: which is why ultimately parties of the Centre-Left will find themselves one day facing the possibility of political power again. But winning and using that power will require a more assertive and self-confident Centre-Left politics to be in place well before the moment of electoral choice – because only through such counter-hegemonic politics can we guarantee that the progressive coalition in both societies will arrive at its voting moment fully mobilized, able and equipped to support Centre-left parties in power through all the political struggles that inevitably lie ahead.

These arguments are developed more fully in David Coates, Flawed Capitalism: The Anglo-American Condition and Its Resolution, and in the accompanying collection of essays Reflections on the Future of the Left, both published in the UK by Agenda Publishing and in the US by Columbia University Press.

To better grasp the nature of our contemporary condition, David Coates’s Flawed Capitalism offers the following four central theses – placing contemporary politics in the space between dominant social and economic settlements and arguing the case for the creation of a new settlement, more progressive and socially just than either of its predecessor settlements.

SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS & ECONOMIC GROWTH

Post-war US and UK economies have experienced two long periods of sustained growth, each associated with a particular social settlement. The first – triggered by New Dealers in the US and by the Attlee governments in the UK – gave us 25 years of economic growth, full employment and rising living standards, on the basis of a social compact between private businesses and organized labour that allowed profits and wages to rise together. That social settlement ended in the stagflation of the 1970s. The second post-war social settlement – the one triggered by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the United Kingdom and by Ronald Reagan’s Republicans in the United States – was not so balanced. Instead, it was a settlement predicated on the defeat of organized labour and the parallel creation of high levels of income inequality, with generalized living standards rising for later baby-boomers only on the basis of high and ultimately insecure levels of personal debt. That second settlement – the Reagan-Thatcher one – did not simply fall. It crashed in the financial crisis of 2008: and attempts to revive it by conservative politicians in both countries have simply given us a second lost decade that now matches the 1970s in severity and despair.

MORBID SYMPTOMS AND THE NEED FOR A PROGRESSIVE ALTERNATIVE

Politics in both the US and the UK are currently abnormal because the times in which we live are also not normal. Understanding the Trump phenomenon in the US, and even the Brexit vote in the UK, requires therefore that we first understand the abnormal conditions helping to generate both. A second central argument developed within Flawed Capitalism is that the current rise of right-wing populism in the advanced industrial world must be seen a product (and the Trump and Brexit votes as examples) of what Antonio Gramsci long ago called “morbid symptoms” – symptoms of madness generated in the interregnum between social settlements. If that formulation is right, ending those morbid symptoms will first require the creation of a new social settlement which alone can bring the interregnum to a close; and to succeed in that closure, any new social settlement will necessarily have to be more progressive one than the settlement it replaces, since it was its predecessor’s reactionary character that was the ultimate cause of its collapse.

THE FOLLY OF AUSTERITY POLITICS

Recent attempts to revive the neoliberal social settlement – by Tory-led governments in the UK, and by ultra-conservative Republicans in the US Congress and now White House – have had similarly appalling social consequences in both economies. These consequences include: intensified pressure on the living standards of working families, and the associated rise in levels of personal indebtedness; persistent and deepening poverty for the low paid, the unemployed, and those reliant on welfare benefits; the persistent failure to ease and improve the balance families need to strike between work and home; intensified racism and hostility to immigration; and the emergence of at least two “lost” generations on each side of the Atlantic – a working class one trapped in areas of declining industrial employment, and a more middle-class millennial one facing (among other things) mountains of student debt, rising housing costs and the burden of heavy transport and childcare expenses.

THE PROGRESSIVE ALTERNATIVE

The way forward to a new social settlement is both clear and urgent. The way forward isclear – we need to see the rapid creation of a social settlement based on greater income equality, on a fairer gender balance and greater flexibility in hours and organization of employment, and on a new compact between a progressive state and a revitalized private sector, the two working together to rise productivity by harnessing the full set of talents currently lying dormant in a labour force increasingly alienated by wage, employment and family pressures. The need is also urgent: for without such a settlement, the material and social deprivations sustaining right-wing populism can only grow. The British Labour Party – in its Corbyn-led form – offers a route to that new settlement if its progressive policy trajectory can be maintained; and the Democrats will find themselves with a similar opportunity in Washington DC in 2020 if the Sanders wing of the party can come to prevail. So, the future is all to play for. We live in interesting times; but with the times come both opportunity and responsibility. An opportunity now exists to call into existence a new and more progressive social settlement. It is an opportunity that this generation of progressives must not waste. They can only waste it by failing to recognize it, and by failing to act. Flawed Capitalism has been written to help prevent that wastage.

David Coates, Flawed Capitalism: The Anglo-American Condition and Its Resolution, is published in the UK by Agenda Publishing: Available May 15, 2018.

The daily circus that is the visible face of contemporary American politics keeps our gaze firmly fixed on the character of the ring-master: but it does so to our long-term cost.

Admittedly, it is quite a circus, and one heck of a circus master – certainly a circus and a show of a kind that none of us have ever seen before. So, it is entirely understandable and legitimate for liberal-minded commentators regularly to worry about the fitness of Donald J. Trump for the most important political office in American politics – because it is not at all obvious that he is fit to do anything of the kind.1 His mental condition and his narcissism were visible as problems to many even before he was elected;2 and his subsequent behavior has done nothing to abate the fears expressed then. Instead, since January 20, 2017 we have endured a near-daily presidential tweet-storm, a regular flow of inconsistent and ill-conceived presidential statements, and an on-going probe into the connections between this President and America’s leading opponent abroad. Which is possibly why so many words have been expended day upon day in the liberal blogosphere, with a seemingly endless list of public intellectuals wondering about the President’s character, and asking at what point the Republican Party will stop propping up every Trump initiative, and at last join the ranks of the sane – those who actually have the mental superiority and stability that the President claims to be his alone.3

The sad truth, however, is that such a Republican Party “Road to Damascus” moment will likely be very slow to arrive: because behind all the bluster and the circus nonsense associated with this President, his Administration is quietly facilitating the full implantation of the Republican Party’s long-term ultra- conservative agenda. It is on that implementation and that agenda, therefore, rather than on the bluster and the madness, that in 2018 we all need our gaze to be firmly fixed.

I

For these three reasons at least: that

The Trump Administration is quietly and effectively resetting the relationship between the privately-run market and the democratically-elected state, pushing back on a half-century or more of regulatory initiatives designed to curtail the worst excesses of unregulated capitalism. The evidence here? The Environmental Protection Agency is now in the hands of a politically-appointed leadership committed to its complete emasculation. The Education Department is in the hands of a leadership committed to shifting resources away from public schools that are answerable to local school boards, towards charter schools provided by democratically-unaccountable organizations with their own private agendas of educational and religious change. The Energy Department is now headed by a politician who, as a presidential candidate, once advocated its total closure; and the Housing Department answers to a leading opponent of publicly-provided housing. Steve Bannon may no longer be flavor of the month in the Trump White House as it begins its second year in power, but his ghost remains fully active. The dismantling of the administrative state is well underway in Trump’s rapidly changing America, and serious damage is being done – and done deliberately – to the ability of the US federal government to regulate anything effectively.

The Administration’s Republican allies are rapidly re-establishing the case for “trickle-down economics,” in the process eating away at the last vestiges of an already inadequate welfare net – the one painstakingly constructed by previous generations of more liberally-minded politicians to protect those least able to benefit from the full force of unregulated market forces. Instead of a federally-funded welfare state, Republicans in Congress are entirely focused now on strengthening the American warfare state. In the new orthodoxies swirling in the Washington conservative “swamp” that candidate Trump once promised to drain, money is supposedly impossible to find for the expansion of welfare programs, but not difficult to find at all when the Pentagon calls, or when the donor class require their appeasement. Indeed, if any one tries to find that money, the Republicans’ latest tax reform penalizes the electorate of any state that has the temerity to compensate inadequate federal funding of basic welfare services by raising local taxes for that purpose. So much for the Republican Party’s supposed enthusiasm for states’ rights. Instead of helping the poor, “trickle-down economics” and tax-breaks for the corporate rich are now the order of the day – hailed as a political success by a Republican Party whose main figures are entirely in the grip of the ultra-rich who fund their campaigns.

Even the Trump bluster helps the Republican cause, alienating ever more frustrated American voters from the existing political class, and by discrediting them, making it ever harder to persuade a new generation of American voters to put their faith in politicians willing to deploy state-power for progressive purposes. The tweet-storm that Donald J. Trump regularly inflicts upon us does more than release a series of rabbits to endlessly chase. It also consistently challenges the reliability and credibility of serious political journalism, of serious science, and of serious moral reflection. By seeking to create a world divided between the facts he cares about and the facts he dislikes, by endlessly denigrating the journalists and scientists who produce information that contradicts his assertions of truth, and by endlessly and blatantly lying,4 Donald J. Trump as President daily corrodes the quality of the political discourse vital to maintain the integrity of our national democratic conversation. And yet more worrying in this regard, in its anti-statist and anti-democratic stance the Trump presidency is regularly reinforced by his Republican Party allies – allies who are prepared to gerrymander their way to power, and to hang on to that power by suppressing the progressive vote by every legal means at their disposal. All of which suggests that the Republican Party will not dump Donald J. Trump so long as his Administration services their long-term goals, and so long as supporting him does not cost them large-scale electoral support.

II

For there is the rub. Donald J. Trump thinks he is leading the Republican Party – that he is the one making the great deals – when in reality it is the Republican-controlled Congress that is playing him! The bluster that is daily created by a supposedly crazy President actually throws a smoke-screen over the implementation of a Republican Party project that is now up and running as never before – a project designed to remove the last vestiges of twentieth-century liberalism from twenty-first century America. The privatization of FDR’s Social Security is now fully in the Republicans’ sights. So now is Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare and Medicaid, and not just Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. This President, and this Republican-controlled Congress, are collectively set on nothing less than the complete re-specification of the basic relationships at play in contemporary America. They are set on redesigning the underlying social agreement now in place between the healthy and the sick, between immigrants and the native-born, between men and women, between Americans of differing sexual orientations and religions, between the rich and the poor, and – most of all – between those who own capital and those who do not. In every case the direction of change now being proposed by Trump and the Republicans is not simply conservative. It is also radical: a reassertion, in a new age, of older notions of patriarchy, of homophobia, of nativism and of anti-intellectualism in all its forms. Before 2016, mainstream America was –– incrementally, if somewhat reluctantly – dragging itself in the direction of welfare programs based on compassion, environmental policies based on science, and – even to a modest degree – foreign policies based on diplomacy as military options failed to deliver desired outcomes. All that is off the table in Washington right now, and if Trump and his Republican friends have their way, all that will stay off the table for a very long time to come: leaving the America of the 2020s resembling in all so many ways the America of the 20s a century before.

When former Vice-President Joe Biden went on The Late Show in November 2017,5 he explained to Stephen Colbert that his return to full-time campaigning was a product of his growing conviction that more was at stake right now in contemporary American politics than the detail of this particular policy or that. What was at stake, he said, was the very soul of America. He was right. That is exactly what is at stake. The basic contract between Americans is being rapidly reset by highly reactionary forces – a resetting that in the process is making America an uglier society – to such a degree, indeed, that those of us who believe in the underlying beauty of this place need to challenge Trump and the Republicans at every level of this resetting. So yes, we do need to regularly question the President’s sanity, and query his intellect: but we need to do so much more as well. We need to call his Republican allies to account – the ones that will still be in power in Congress even if impeachment removes Trump from office – and challenge them on the kind of America that they are seeking to create. The big threat to a civilized America is not just one maverick individual. The big threat is a Republican Party rampant with reactionary ideas.

For what is at stake here is not just the Trump Presidency. It is the character of the America that Trump and his allies want to leave in place when they are no longer in office. They know what they are about – they are building an America for the rich and privileged. It is time, therefore, for their political opponents to make clear what we too are about – building an America for all Americans. That building has happened before – in Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. There were elements of it in Obama’s stalled domestic programs. It is time for the Democratic Left to forge a new and compassionate society – a New Deal for the twenty-first century that will make America genuinely great again. And it is time too for the Democratic Left to tell America that this is exactly its purpose. This is no time to triangulate with the devil. It is time to say to Trump and the Republicans that their day is well and truly done. America can be so much better than that!

You might be forgiven for thinking – given all that has happened since Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the US presidency in November 2016 – that buyers’ remorse would be rampant in contemporary America. But it is not. It is true that Donald J. Trump started his presidency capturing only a minority of the popular vote;1 and that he is significantly less popular in polls taken today than he was on election day. But very substantial pockets of support remain.2 They remain among members of his electoral base. They remain among life-long Republicans, not all of whom greeted his emergence as their presidential candidate in 2016 with any great enthusiasm; and they remain – as far as one can tell – in the deepest recesses of the Alt-Right. In those circles at least, there is much talk of seven years of Donald J. Trump in the White House; and for those of us who do not care for that prospect, the immediate political imperative is clear. We need to understand who voted for the Trump-Pence ticket in 2016, why they did so, and whether any or all of them can be dissuaded from doing so again in 2020.

One way of doing that is to build a detailed map of promises made, constituencies mobilized, and commitments delivered; so that – properly armed with the record of aspiration and achievement – the debate in 2018 and 2020 can be built on solid evidence rather than on fake facts. That mapping will be the subject of a later posting linked to this one, but any mapping needs to come after, rather than before, an examination of buyers’ remorse: because not all of those who bought into Trump’s electoral upset did so because of specific policy promises.3 On the contrary, both the reasons for supporting a Trump presidency, and the intensity of that support itself, varied across the electoral coalition; and because it did, not all of the coalition’s constituent parts can be easily persuaded – thus far at least – to regret their November 2016 decision.4

But some can, and we need to know which.

I

Electoral coalitions are invariably constructed as though they were tall buildings. They have floors and floors of participants within them, some of whom are more fundamental to the structure of the building than are others. The Trump electoral coalition certainly took that form. It was very much like a real Trump tower, combining a solid base of unshakable Trump support with a middle level of reluctant if still willing supporters, and a top layer of those voting for Donald Trump for want of someone better. The Trump name may be blazoned across the whole thing, but the whole building is not united in its enthusiasm about the labeling. On the contrary, the higher up the electoral tower you go, the greater degree of buyers’ remorse you are likely to uncover; and with it, the greater the possibility of rolling back the coalition – certainly in 2020 and arguably before.

TOP FLOORS

There were at least three significant groups of voters in November 2016 who are unlikely to vote for Donald Trump the next time around. The first are the Sanders supporters who voted for Jill Stein (or even for Donald Trump himself) to make what they thought was a safe protest vote against a sure Clinton victory. The second are the many voters who, though disliking Donald Trump as a candidate and not necessarily sharing his politics, so disliked Hillary Clinton that they were prepared to sup with the devil to keep her out.5The third, no doubt overlapping with the second, are the Democratic Party faithful who failed to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate this time round.The size of each of these groups should not be under-estimated, nor their significance for the final outcome downplayed. For on the contrary, the electoral data from November 2016 suggests that, in the wake of the bitter primary battles between Clinton and Sanders, more than 1 in 10 of Bernie’s primary supporters eventually cast their vote in the general election for Trump rather than for Clinton.6 The electoral data also suggests that as many as 51 percent of those telling Pew Research that they intended to vote for Donald J. Trump did so “because they [had] rejected Mrs. Clinton rather than because they support[ed] the businessman;”7 and in a key state like Michigan, many former Democratic Party supporters simply stayed home. Obama won Michigan in 2012 by 350,000 votes. Hillary Clinton lost Michigan in 2016 by 10,000 votes: and did so by polling almost 300,000 votes less than Obama had four years before. It was “those sure-Democrats who stayed home” who then “handed the election to Trump;”8 and in doing so clearly got more than they bargained for. Which is why it seems reasonable to expect growing evidence of buyers’ remorse among all three of these groups; and even if that remorse is not yet visible among the anti-Hillary crowd, where the source of the animosity runs deepest, Hillary Clinton will presumably not be standing as a candidate in 2020 – so Donald J. Trump will not be able to capitalize on the anti-Hillary vote twice, try as he undoubtedly will to keep the “crooked Hillary” theme running for as long as he can.

MIDDLE FLOORS

The middle floors are currently more solid for Donald J. Trump than they will be soon. A significant if indeterminant number of Republicans voted for him in spite of their earlier preference for more conventional Republican presidential candidates. Many of these loyal party voters were presumably motivated ultimately to side with Trump by their desire to see the full Republican platform delivered in a post-Obama era: on health care, on foreign policy,9 on immigration,10 and on taxation. But not all of those Republican voters were (or are now) enthusiastic Trump supporters. On the contrary, many who identified themselves as loyal and committed Republicans apparently voted for Donald J. Trump reluctantly and with unease. They did so because – when push came to shove – it was more important to them that their party should control the White House than it was that its occupant should be the perfect embodiment of their ideals. And alongside them it seems sensible to put two other groups of voters whose electoral support any Republican standard-bearer would presumably have won: committed libertarians on the one side, and social conservatives on the other. The post-election polling data suggests very limited amounts of buyers’ remorse among these groups yet, not least because of the pattern of judicial appointments that the Trump White House has quietly pursued. But remorse is beginning to emerge now, at least among those few moderate Republicans openly talking of voting Democrat in 2018 to stop the Bannon bus, and among the handful of conservative Republican Senators now declining to run for re-election because of their personal vulnerability to the Trump-Bannon bandwagon. Let us hope that soon there will be more.

LOWER FLOORS

Then there is the Trump base: this complex mixture of alt-right voters normally excluded from the mainstream of American politics, and blue-collar Americans in rust-belt states who normally vote without enthusiasm/hope, but this time they voted in unprecedented numbers because they had found – they thought – a champion.11 Donald J. Trump was embraced by them because he articulated a vision of an America in which white working- class families would do better again with him in the presidency12 than they had under a black Democratic President or would under a white female one. Donald J. Trump won these rust-belt states by appealing to their economic interest and to their patriotism, and by toying with both the racism13 latent in parts of that base14 and the antipathy to east coast elites15 that is more general in blue-collar America.16 According to exit polls on election day itself, Trump beat Clinton 2:1 among high-school graduates, and established a stunning 61:20 voting gap among white only high-school educated men. Particularly in the ‘Rust Belt” states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Trump flipped a third of the counties that had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, en route to victory.17

If you chose to explain this part of the Trump vote in terms of racism, ignorance and xenophobia, then of course no buyers’ remorse can be expected here. But since the truth is otherwise – that the bulk of the rust-belt vote was a rational response to systematic neglect of working-class interests by free-trade advocates on both sides of the party divide in Washington DC – buyers’ remorse even here is surely just a matter of time. For although some part of the Trump base is too entrenched in its racism and nativism to be winnable by any form of progressive politics, and should not be pursued even for a moment for that very reason, the bulk of the Trump base was not attracted to him by his dark side. They were driven in his direction because he promised them jobs, prosperity and respect; and as he fails to deliver any of those things as he governs, the gap between the Trump promise and the Trump performance should eventually trigger a significant degree of buyers’ remorse even in sections of his core support.

II

Understood that way, both the prospects and the tasks facing anti-Trump forces in the next two electoral cycles (2018 and 2020) are clear. The prospects are these: that Donald J. Trump will continue – both by his style of governing and whatever content he brings to it – to mobilize significant resistance among would-be Sanders voters, among those drawn to him in 2016 only out of antipathy to Hillary Clinton, and among those looking to him for economic salvation. Donald J. Trump will do his best, that is, to recruit for his opposition by regularly pandering only to the most conservative elements of his base. Indeed, if the last ten months are any guide, many mainstream Republican voters too may come to have serious buyers’ remorse as the Trump presidency continues to implode.

How substantial that buyers’ remorse turns out to be, however, rests on three other things, none of which Donald J. Trump directly controls. It depends on moderate Republicans being willing to put country before party. It depends on the Democratic Party getting its act together quickly and with enthusiasm; and it depends on the political class as a whole finding ways of restoring a basic trust in federal politics that the Trump victory demonstrated to be now widely absent. Restoring that trust is not going to be easy; and it certainly will not happen so long as moderate Republicans remain immobilized by the threat of a Steve Bannon-orchestrated primary wave, and the Democratic Party – deep in its own internal crisis – remains unclear on whether its return to power is best achieved by tacking to the center or by pulling to the left.

The weight of responsibility that a Trump presidency places on the shoulders of moderate Republicans is truly enormous. They may fantasize about finding a Republican presidential candidate to challenge Donald J. Trump in 2020 who stands to Trump’s left – so nearer the political center – and such candidates will no doubt come forward. But with the Republican Party base now so conservative, and Bannon’s alt-right friends mobilized as never before, the chances of such a realignment occurring within the modern Republican Party must be slim indeed. Perhaps voting Democrat in 2018 will be a way of helping ensure that Bannon-type candidates fail in the general election even if they win in the party primary – so helping to educate the Republican base in the need to moderate its conservatism – but if that educational effort fails, as it likely will, moderate Republicans may well need to recognize that, for the foreseeable future at least, the Republican Party is lost to them; so that it is time now to abandon tribalism in favor of service to country.

The Democrats, for their part, would do well to recognize that there is no short-term fix to the policy messes now being created in health care, taxation and immigration by an Administration determined to deconstruct what modest structures remain of the US welfare and environmental state; and that in consequence they should stay away from deal-making with this President. The Democratic Party’s national leadership would also do well to realize that if they tack to the center, hoping to attract to their ranks moderate Republicans in search of a new political home, they will simply embolden the very conservative forces inside the Republican Party that now threaten moderates so severely. The task of the Democrats now is not to turn back towards Wall Street. Nor is it to chase the Republican Party to the Right. The task of the Democrats now is to lay out a clear, precise and progressive answer to the health care, poverty and employment insecurities of mainstream America, to reframe the contemporary political debate as a choice between greed and chaos on the one side and stability and fairness on the other, and then to invite people of good faith to stand with them in the delivery of their superior alternative to Trumpism.

Cocooned as they are by the daily output of the conservative media,18 parts of the Trump base are lost to progressive politics for the conceivable future. But other parts are not. They can be reached, and trust partly restored, by solid promises on healthcare, wage protection and fair taxation. And that is a triad of commitments that can also eat away at the middle layer of the Trump electoral coalition, and re-galvanize the top. Donald J. Trump does not have a vast popular majority to lose. All that is necessary, for the era of Trump to end, is for moderate and sensible Americans to re-assert themselves. That reassertion will make America great again in ways that Donald J. Trump never will!

11Buchheit, “How a Disappearing and Deluded Middle Class Awaits the New President”; Daalder, “How Voters Now See Donald Trump’s America First Agenda”; Davidson, “Trump Is No Fascist. He Is a Champion for the Forgotten Millions | John Daniel Davidson”; Luntz, “Donald Trump’s Bile Is a Healing Balm for Spurned Americans”; Rosenfeld, “Trump Elected President by Wave of Angry White Voters Across Upper Midwest and South.”

14DeVega, “The Disturbing Data on Republicans and Racism”; Hahn, “The Rage of White Folk”; Masciotra, “White Flight From Reality”; Milbank, “Yes, Half of Trump Supporters Are Racist”; Anderson, “America Is More Racially Divided than It Has Been in Decades.”

Allon, Janet. 2016. “Krugman Gets to the Bottom of Why the White Working Class Votes Against Its Own Interests.” AlterNet, November 25, 2016. https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/krugman-gets-bottom-why-white-working-class-votes-against-its-own-interests.

Anderson, Carol. 2016. “America Is More Racially Divided than It Has Been in Decades.” Financial Times. August 2, 2016. https://www.ft.com/content/1456e78c-589a-11e6-9f70-badea1b336d4.

Cesca, Bob. 2016. “Trump and the Exploitation of Right Rage: It’s Not the Economy, Stupid, That’s Attracting Angry White Men to Him.” AlterNet, August 14, 2016. https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-and-exploitation-right-rage-its-not-economy-stupid-thats-attracting-angry-white-men.

Cowling, David. 2016. “It Should Have Been in the Bag: So Why on Earth Did Trump Win? | The Political Studies Association (PSA).” Political Studies Association. November 23, 2016. https://www.psa.ac.uk/insight-plus/blog/it-should-have-been-bag-so-why-earth-did-trump-win.

Davidson, John Daniel. 2017. “Trump Is No Fascist. He Is a Champion for the Forgotten Millions | John Daniel Davidson.” The Guardian, February 5, 2017, sec. Opinion. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/trump-not-fascist-champion-for-forgotten-millions.

DeVega, Chauncey. 2016. “The Disturbing Data on Republicans and Racism: Trump Backers Are the Most Bigoted Within the GOP.” AlterNet, July 8, 2016. https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-backers-most-bigoted-gop.

Engelhardt, Tom. 2016. “Many Desperate Voters Are So Unmoored, They Are Grabbing for a Loose Cannon, the Ultimate Corrupt Huckster… in a Long American Tradition.” AlterNet, October 6, 2016. https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/age-decline.

Gerson, Michael. 2016. “Despite What Trump and Sanders Say, the American Dream Has Not Been Stolen – The Washington Post.” The Washington Post, February 1, 2016, sec. Opinions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/despite-what-trump-and-sanders-say-the-american-dream-has-not-been-stolen/2016/02/01/20919c2e-c90a-11e5-88ff-e2d1b4289c2f_story.html?utm_term=.5533840e7def.

Gibbons-Neff, Thomas, and Dan Lamothe. 2016. “Why Many Veterans Are Sticking with Trump, Even after He Insulted a Gold Star Family – The Washington Post.” The Washington Post. April 22, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/08/22/trumpmilitary/?utm_term=.eb0642f18d06.

Graves, Lucia. 2017. “Why Hillary Clinton Was Right about White Women – and Their Husbands.” The Guardian, September 25, 2017, sec. US news. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/25/white-women-husbands-voting.

Payne, Michael. 2017. “Trump Supporters: Like the Passengers Standing on the Deck of the Titanic as It Started to Go Down.” NationofChange (blog). April 2, 2017. https://www.nationofchange.org/2017/04/02/trump-supporters-like-passengers-standing-deck-titanic-started-go/.

Rucker, Philip, and Robert Costa. 2016. “Republican Hopefuls Agree: The Key to the White House Is Working-Class Whites.” Washington Post, January 13, 2016, sec. Politics. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republican-hopefuls-agree-the-key-to-the-white-house-is-working-class-whites/2016/01/12/fa8a16aa-b626-11e5-a76a-0b5145e8679a_story.html.

Rucker, Philip, and David A. Fahrenthold. 2016. “Donald Trump Positions Himself as the Voice of ‘the Forgotten Men and Women.’” Washington Post, July 22, 2016, sec. Politics. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-speech-at-republican-national-convention-trump-to-paint-dire-picture-of-america/2016/07/21/418f9ae6-4fad-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html.

Scheiring, Gabor. 2016. “The Rise of Illiberalism from East to the West: A Lesson About Class for the Left.” Political Critique (blog). November 12, 2016. http://politicalcritique.org/cee/hungary/2016/the-rise-of-illiberalism-from-east-to-the-west-a-lesson-about-class-for-the-left/.

Stephens, Randall J. n.d. “Trump Is an Avowed Sinner – so Why Did American Evangelicals Vote for Him?” The Conversation. Accessed October 14, 2017. http://theconversation.com/trump-is-an-avowed-sinner-so-why-did-american-evangelicals-vote-for-him-68528.

The Economist. 2016. “Illness as Indicator,” November 19, 2016. https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21710265-local-health-outcomes-predict-trumpward-swings-illness-indicator.

…. The primary problem faced by the Centre-Left in both the US and the UK is not ultimately one of programme. Adequate policy proposals abound. The problem lies rather in the lack of electoral support for such proposals, and in the internal weaknesses of the political parties available for their dissemination and delivery. The weakness of the Centre-Left in both countries, therefore, is less that one of policy than it is of agency.

In the United States, the Democrats have been losing ground steadily since 2010, and doing so despite holding the White House until 2017. Currently more than two-thirds of all US states are run by Republican governors, the ranks of state legislators contain at least 9,000 fewer Democrats than they did a decade ago, and the White House is now lost. So even as an electoral machine, the Democratic Party is not performing adequately; and it is an inadequacy firmly rooted in the fact that too many local Democratic Parties see themselves as just that, as mere electoral machines. They raise money. Every two or four years, they canvass; and between elections they hunt out candidates. But what they do not then do is hold those candidates tightly accountable to a previously agreed set of policies and principles. Only Republicans – from Tea Party activists to socially-conservative evangelicals – do that. It is time, therefore, for the Democrats to recognize that they must take a leaf from their opponent’s play-book, and forge a party held together by programme and by ideology rather than simply by money and electioneering. It is also time for centrist Democrats to recognize what the election result in 2016 made abundantly clear to the rest of us: namely that the future electoral success of progressive forces in the United States lies with the Sanders’ wing of the Party, and no longer with the Clintonites. Indeed, the sooner Democrats unite around those two recognitions, the quicker the Party’s electoral fortunes will begin once more to turn.

At the very least, therefore, in this next phase of defensive battles against Republican excess and Trump bombast, the Democratic Party needs to stay together as a federal as well as a state/local force between elections, and to widen its understanding of what winning elections entails. Donald Trump will do his best to recruit for them, by generating one excess after another; and as he does so, the Democrats will need to resolve how best to articulate the identity politics they have been playing effectively for the last four decades with the class politics they pursued so successfully through the New Deal period. By not articulating those two things successfully in the last 25 years, the Party lost contact with key parts of its white working-class base. Getting those votes back, without losing other demographics, requires nothing less than the rekindling of a broad class alliance around issues of poverty and rights, as well as around issues of identity and rights. The Sanders’ 2016 campaign focus on income inequality constituted an important moment in the building of that alliance, but the Democratic Party now needs more than merely a critique of millionaires and billionaires. It needs a critique of the interplay of class and power at every level of contemporary US society, and not just at the top – offsetting the Republican Party’s presentation of Americans as simply consumers with that of Americans as also workers – a focus making worker rights and trade union growth as central to American freedom as civil rights and equal protection under the law, and one making the Democratic Party not simply more progressive but also more social democratic.

That will not be easy, because America is ultimately a country of edges and middles, with some version of a social democratic (in US terms, New Deal) culture still firmly entrenched on the West Coast and in parts of the East, but largely missing in vast swathes of the middle of the country, particularly in the South. Things should progress more rapidly in the UK because there, by contrast, political culture is far more social democratic than it is libertarian, and as much shaped by “one nation” Toryism as it is by neoliberalism of the Thatcherite variety. The Labour Party therefore has far less of an uphill battle on its hands than do American Democrats to persuade people than the public provision of welfare services, for example, is both necessary and superior to any privately-provided equivalent. And yet for all that the Party out-performed expectations in 2017, the fact that Labour has now lost three elections in a row tells us just how weak programmatically it had become by 2010, and how tarnished the Party remains by its long New Labour dalliance with Thatcherism.

As Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is quietly demonstrating, the Labour Party needs to rebuild an electoral base for itself that is as passionate and as committed as the Democratic Party will soon enjoy as the limits of the Republicans’ austerity policies reveal themselves, and as opposition to Trump excesses grows. That rebuilding requires Labour to continue to sharpen its critique of its own immediate past as New Labour, and to fill the ranks of the Parliamentary Party with a new and more radical generation of politicians untainted by that past. The call is currently on, from every current of opinion within the broad Labour-Party tent, for the Party to reconnect to key groups of voters, to re-establish public confidence in its economic competence, and to make clear its underlying vision. Of course, it must do those things: but Labour will not achieve any of them if, as some Blairites now propose, rather than breaking with its New Labour past it prioritizes instead meeting the immediate concerns of Conservative marginal voters in the south and the midlands, and redefines its central task as that of reversing the drift away from voters in southern England. For the new and predominantly young membership that flowed into the Labour Party to support the Corbyn leadership spoke to a wider recognition that there is no “southern England, centrist” route back to power for UK Labour. The Conservative Government is completely in control of that pass out of the mountains. To regain power, and to regain it on terms that will enable that power to be used for progressive ends, Labour – like its Democratic equivalent in the United States – has no real choice other than to turn itself again into a movement of principled social reform and economic regeneration, and then to show both the sense and the courage to invite its electorate to join it in the many struggles that will ensue.

For ultimately there are only two ways of reconnecting a party to its voters: reconnection by transforming the party, or reconnection by transforming the voters. A truly progressive political party has no genuine option – if its progressive goals are ultimately to be achieved – but to prioritize the second of those: the transformation of its electorate. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Centre-Left has been on the defensive for far too long, letting conservative voices set the political agenda and the specification of the legitimate range of public policy. The consequences of that defensive stance have been, and remain, appalling. We can, and we need, to do better than a Trump presidency and a Conservative-led Brexit. The time, and the opportunity, for the progressive re-radicalization of politics is at hand in both the US and the UK. It is a time and an opportunity that need not be, and must not be, wasted.

(extracts from “Trawling the past as guide to the future,” in David Coates (editor), Reflections on the Future of the Left. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, September 2017.)

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https://www.davidcoates.net/2017/09/18/the-anglo-american-centre-left-and-the-problem-of-agency/feed/0https://www.davidcoates.net/2017/09/18/the-anglo-american-centre-left-and-the-problem-of-agency/Taking Supper with Trump – The Need for a Very Long Spoonhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DavidCoates/~3/pYnyFon3Rc8/
https://www.davidcoates.net/2017/09/16/taking-supper-with-trump-the-need-for-a-very-long-spoon/#respondSat, 16 Sep 2017 16:48:12 +0000https://www.davidcoates.net/?p=1635

The Democratic Party leadership in both the House and the Senate spent last week congratulating themselves on the deal they supposedly struck with the President on legislation to protect dreamers,1 and presumably took some pleasure too from the adverse impact of that supposed deal on Trump’s relationship with Congressional Republicans and his base.

They should not do so.

They should spend their time worrying instead about the adverse effects on the electoral credibility of a Democratic Party that gets too close to this President, and on a leadership team that – by getting so close – erodes the distance between themselves and a president who is uniquely unsuited to the office.2

I

Dining with the devil always requires the use of a long spoon;3 and it does so in this case for at least the following reasons.

Deals made with this President don’t last one tweet-cycle.4 He is not dealing honestly with the Democratic Leadership, he is playing them. It may be, on this issue at least, that the President finds himself more of a closet Democrat than he normally admits; but even so, through the specifics of the deal struck last week all the parties to it are taking DACA participants on yet another emotionally-charged roller-coaster ride, for no ultimate benefit to any one of them.

Even if the deal is genuine in Trump’s mind, the Democratic Leadership is in no position to deliver it. Power lies in both Houses of Congress with the Republican majority, and they will not automatically play ball. Paul Ryan is quite right.5 Republicans, not Democrats, decide what policy initiatives come to the House for a vote. Republican legislators may yet reconstitute the Dream Act: but if they do so, it will be because of Republican Party concerns about a loss of electoral support, not because of any supper-deal struck between Trump, Schumer and Pelosi. Indeed, for some Republican lawmakers, that deal might very well get in the way.

The President is only dealing with Democrats in this supposedly bi-partisan manner because of divisions within the Republican Party that the deals serve only to hide. By making deals with a beleaguered president, the Democratic Leadership team is not only helping to restore the credibility of his leadership – something they need at all costs to avoid doing. They are also letting the Republicans off the hook – a hook of which the electorate need to remain fully aware as we move towards a mid-term election season in which Democratic Party candidates could prosper.

While making deals that look mildly progressive, this President’s Administration is simultaneously planning or initiating a whole series of reactionary policies (in the Justice Department, at Education, and at the EPA) on which Democrats need to concentrate, and which night-time deal making can only help to obscure. This is an Administration working assiduously, for example, to allow oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.6 It is one whose Education Department is working to erode critical Title IX guidance on campus sexual misconduct,7 and whose Justice Department is currently overseeing the re-segregation of American schools.8 It is one set on rolling back hard-won LGBT rights; and it is one whose head is currently struggling to avoid the full exposure of his links to Putin and the Russian Intelligence Services. This is no time, therefore, for the throwing of any kind of Democratic life-line to a reactionary Administration in free-fall.

Any notion that this President can be “turned” on DACA runs in the face of his persistent attacks on immigrants from the Middle East and on undocumented workers from Mexico, and runs entirely counter to his long-standing antipathy to anything initiated by Barack Obama. According to Trump the birther, his predecessor as president was an original Dreamer.9 Trading on DACA with Donald J. Trump, were it even politically viable, would involve – at the very least – concessions on the nonsense of the Wall, and indirect legitimation of his xenophobic immigration stance. An effective political opposition cannot simultaneously strike deals and strike poses – either this man and his policies are anathema, or they are not!

II

So far from joining this president in nightline soirees and backdoor dealing, the Democratic Party leadership in Congress would do better to take a leaf from the playbook which their Republican opponents used when Barack Obama was president: that of total and principled opposition. When the Republicans treated President Obama in that way, they showed themselves in their true colors – as reactionary, as residually racist, and as devoid of concern for the least advantaged among us. They set their face against a president who possessed moderately progressive values, in the process making crystal-clear to all the ultra-conservative nature of their own. We need that clarity of difference again. Faced with a president who is uniquely narcissistic, homophobic and racist,10 a position of principled opposition to everything Donald J. Trump stands for will make crystal-clear that the Democratic Party is none of those things.

Playing the politics of theatre with a reactionary president in political trouble runs the danger of ruining the end of the play for those of us dedicated to seeing Trump gone, and better American values dominant again in both the White House and the Congress.

Keeping track of important policy developments with Donald J. Trump as President is difficult and yet vital. There is so much noise and distraction surrounding everything that the current President does, and such a perplexing mixture of bombast and bigotry in so much of what he says, that the important things going on quietly behind the scenes can so easily fall off our collective political radar.

One such development which that radar briefly picked up was the content of what the President called on August 21st “our path forward in Afghanistan and South Asia.” At least he did give a public address on this, mapping out – if only in rather general terms – his thinking on what that path should be, a public address that was carried by the networks during prime time.1 So, some at least of the foreign policy thinking going on quietly behind the scenes did briefly surface in late August. But it was a surfacing that was sandwiched between two controversial presidential statements on the events in Charlottesville – statements which understandably then received far more attention and analysis in the national and international media than did Trump’s public ruminations on how he plans to bring America’s longest-running war to a successful conclusion.

I

That lack of follow-up and attention is a pity, for when addressing the nation from Fort Myer in Arlington, Donald J. Trump said at least three things that should give us all cause for concern. He said:

“We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists…. From now on, victory will have a clear definition: attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.”

“The consequences of rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable…. A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and al Qaeda, would instantly fill…. We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq…. However, our commitment is not unlimited, and our support is not a blank check.”

“Our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifice of lives.”

The problem with the first of those three statements is that the United States cannot hope to succeed by killing terrorists – even if somehow that is how success is to be measured – if in pursuing them, America’s military endeavors so destroy the fabric of the society in which those terrorists operate that, unless nation-building rapidly follows, the number of new terrorists available to be killed will grow rather than diminish. “As we lift restrictions and expand authorities in the field,” Donald J. Trump told his Fort Myer audience, “we are already seeing dramatic results in the campaign to defeat ISIS, including the liberation of Mosul in Iraq. Since my inauguration, we have achieved record-breaking success in that regard.” Really? Has the President actually seen the pictures of liberated Mosul? That liberation came at the cost of the near-total destruction of whole areas of the city and was accompanied by heavy civilian casualties. “According to the UN, half of the old city of Mosul, and a third of the old city of Aleppo, in Syria, are [now] rubble.”2 The liberation of Mosul also came with a predictable consequence – the shift in ISIS’s focus away from holding onto territory in Iraq towards one of random destruction in European cities. The bombs are flying everywhere. American ones from the sky. Terrorist ones from cars and trucks loaded with explosives; and in the process, though terrorists are no doubt dying in considerable numbers, so also are the innocents. How long, therefore, is it going to take this new Administration to realize that, by bombing terrorists from the sky, the American military breeds them faster than they kill them? How long before this Administration realizes that its ramping up of military operations “across the greater Middle East…more troops, more bombs, more missions” will stumble us, not into a permanent peace, but rather into “another decade of war”?3

The problem with the second of the three key Trump assertions – that the origins of what he called the “bad and very complex hand” left to him by his predecessor rested in the Obama strategy of withdrawing troops on pre-specified deadlines – is this. The origins of the “bad and complex hand” that he inherited lie far further back than that. They lie in the decision by Obama’s predecessor as president, George W. Bush, to turn a war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan into one against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, a decision now widely recognized to have been a huge foreign policy blunder, and one that fundamentally destabilized the very region that the original invasion of Afghanistan was meant to avoid. Donald Trump would do well to remember that he is not the first modern president to be dealt a “bad and complex hand.” During the Obama presidency, troops eventually left Iraq at the behest of the Iraqi government, not the American one, in an agreement signed with the Bush Administration before Obama took office. And signed with a weak and corrupt (though formally democratically-elected) Iraqi government whose contemporary Afghan equivalent is now being told by Donald J. Trump that the United States will ultimately leave it to its fate if it fails to deliver what he termed “real reforms, real progress, and real results.” “Our patience is not unlimited. We will keep our eyes wide open,” he said. So, is the Obama strategy of withdrawing US troops to pre-specified deadlines” really off the table, or is it not? It was off the table on page 2 of the Fort Myer speech, but was apparently back on again by page 4.

The problem with the third assertion – that we cannot settle for anything less than an “honorable and enduring outcome” because of the deaths already of so many American military personnel in this 16-year long war – is that setting the bar that high commits us to a steady re-engagement with the whole Afghan conundrum. It commits us to policies that guarantee that more American lives will be lost, and to policies that lock America into a condition of permanent war. The President promised his military audience at Fort Myer that his Administration would provide more spending, more equipment, and more autonomy for commanders on the ground: as though the reason the war has dragged on for 16 years is that the American military effort within it has been systematically-underfunded and politically over-controlled for too long. But none of that is true – and pretending that it is true can only bring greater loss of life to US military personnel and Afghan civilians alike. And if the new thinking – the bit that is really new – is that the Taliban resurgence is really the product of covert long-term Pakistani support that now needs to be challenged, then the logic of the President’s August argument is truly terrifying: a widening of the Afghan war into one with/within nuclear-armed Pakistan itself, to guarantee that the death toll will include Pakistanis in large numbers, and not just Americans and Afghanis.

II

In saner and more-subtle political hands, maybe some of this could be discretely transformed into a policy of incremental withdrawal from a war that is proving unwinnable in a country whose geography and internal politics have defeated empires before. But we currently don’t have those saner and more-subtle political hands in charge.

Instead, we have a president who, as a candidate, claimed to have a secret and definitive plan for rapid success against ISIS – a plan better than any generated by the generals – one so brilliant indeed that he wouldn’t go into any details of its content before its deployment.4 Well, that turned out to be an entirely specious claim, did it not: one that now has been fully exposed by a president who would appear currently to be entirely in the hands of his generals, and not just on foreign policy matters alone.5 And of course, we also have a president who, when a candidate, proposed the blanket bombing of parts of Iraq,6 and the return to the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture by the CIA and US military.7 The great fear has to be, therefore, that as the months pass and the Afghan impasse continues, this president will go for an ever-heavier military deployment in Afghanistan; and if he does that, that whatever vestigial electoral credibility he by then possesses will be entirely eroded. For as he also told his Fort Myer audience, “the American people are weary of war without victory.” They are “frustrated over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money and most importantly lives, trying to rebuild countries in our own image, instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations.”8 Yet that rebuilding in our own image is precisely what Donald J. Trump’s “path forward in Afghanistan” will continue. What else are we to understand “real reforms, real progress, and real results” to mean?

When we are making the list of the many reasons that buyers’ remorse needs to settle in around this President, the better to remove him quickly from office, his new Afghan policy should be high on the ledger. It should be marked there as one serious item among many – serious items that together are making this presidency not simply distasteful but dangerous!9

See also David Coates, America in the Shadow of Empires. New York, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015.

The great Italian revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci,1 when struggling to understand the rise to power of Benito Mussolini, once wrote this of Italy’s interwar crisis: that it “consists precisely in the fact that the old order is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”2 For Gramsci, the bombastic and narcissistic Mussolini was one such morbid symptom; and it is tempting – given the obvious parallels that could be drawn – to understand Donald J. Trump as his modern-day equivalent. Indeed, that parallel has been drawn,3 and drawing it can be a source of both comfort and enlightenment. But if full comfort and enlightenment are what we really seek, there is much to be gained by focusing instead on the first half of that quotation rather than on the second.

For if Gramsci was right, you get a Mussolini, or a Donald J. Trump, or for that matter the UK’s Nigel Farage, only in the gaps between broad periods of economic stability and social order; and the fact that we now have a president like Donald J. Trump is yet more evidence that – around him and us – an old order is dying and a new one cannot yet be born. If Gramsci was right, understanding the present in this manner, as an interregnum, is in that sense potentially both enlightening and comforting. It is enlightening, in that it underscores the impossibility of finding a new order by relenting pursing the old, in the manner of the Republican Party here and the Conservatives in London; and it is comforting, in that creating that new order gives an overwhelming purpose to the politics of those most opposed to those conservatives – namely the Democrats and the British Labour Party.

I

The “old order” – the one that “is dying” – is the neoliberal one called into existence in the United States by Ronald Reagan and in the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher. It was an “order” based on the deregulation of business, the curtailment of welfare spending, and the generation of economic growth through the weakening of labor movements and the easing of taxation on the rich. In that “order,” the steady pursuit of trickle-down economics left wages stagnant for the mass and generality of workers for an entire generation, obliging working families to maintain or increase their standard of life only by extending the length of the working day, by sending every available member of the family out to paid work, and by taking on higher and higher levels of personal debt. It was that debt-based order that came crashing down in spectacular fashion in September 2008; and which conservative forces on both sides of the Atlantic have been trying to revive ever since by pressing for yet more of the same – more austerity, more tax cuts for the rich, and more deregulation. The Trump budget, and the looming fight over the debt ceiling here in the United States, indicate very clearly that the old order, though dying, is not yet dead. That Trump budget also indicates that the adverse social consequences of now nearly four decades of neoliberalism are poised to become even worse.

That “old order,” of course, was itself once “new” – a reaction in the 1980s to the failure of the New Deal, Keynesian-based order that Democrats in the US, and the Labour Party in the UK, had created in the 1940s: a social compact built on linking wages to productivity that had generated rises in both for a quarter century before running into the buffer of stagflation in the 1970s. Like the 2010s, the 1970s as a decade were full of “morbid symptoms;” but unlike the 2010s, the 1970s were a decade of crisis not for conservatives – they had never bought into the New Deal – but for progressives in both the US and the UK who most definitely had. The Center-Left “owned” the New Deal settlement, just as now the Center-Right “owns” the neoliberal one. The 1970s collapse of the New Deal settlement gave the Center-Right its chance to build a new order, more empathetic to its values and interests. The collapse of their neo-liberal order gives contemporary progressives their chance to do the same. The question therefore becomes: will that chance be taken?

II

It could be. I hope it will be; but it will be only if several things occur.

The first is that key players – in the Democratic Party here, and their equivalents in the British Labour Party – recognize this as the agenda that is now before them. The temptation – in both parties – to play safe and negative is huge, but will need to be avoided. It will not be enough to place the political focus on the morbid symptoms themselves. That vital critique will have to be supplemented by the clear articulation of a bigger thing: a coherent and more progressive way of organizing both the economy and its social rewards. What is at stake here – and the Center-Left must both realize it, and educate its supporters in that realization – is the creation of a new period of stability based on progressive values and sustained by progressive policies. Since those policies, as well as those values, will be vehemently opposed by conservative forces and their privileged backers, it is all the more vital that the Center-Left spends creative time now mapping out in detail what those policies should be, and what kind of economic and social order they will generate.

The second is that, in the process of that mapping, both leaders and activists in the Democratic Party and the Labour Party must make a sharp break with their parties’ own recent accommodation to neoliberalism. There can be no going back to Clinton-style triangulation, or to Blairite enthusiasms for lightly-regulated financial institutions and weakened trade unionism. The biggest struggle the Center-Left currently faces is this internal one: the resistance, within its own leadership ranks, to this rupture with the past and this move towards a new progressive settlement. For too many leading figures in both parties right now, making that move involves admitting their own past errors of judgment; but that admission is vital, if center-left parties are ever going to speak with one voice as they educate their own supporters in the scale of change needed to bring the interregnum to a rapid and a progressive end.

There is no escaping the fact, however, that if these are the changes that are required in the politics of the Democratic Left, then meeting them will be enormously difficult. The problem of agency here is a huge one, and the major barrier to success that the Left faces on both sides of the Atlantic is ultimately itself! But there are small hopeful signs of progress on this front, not least away from these shores, in the growing strength and sophistication of the leadership of the Labour Party by Jeremy Corbyn and his allies.4 There is even some movement in the desired direction back here in the United States: with a slightly more radical set of policy proposals beginning to emerge at last from the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate,5 and with a raft of more progressive proposals now emerging from individual members of Congress (some well-known, some just starting out)6 and from well-established progressive legislative groups7 within the Democratic Party as a whole. But the creation of an all-embracing progressive consensus on both next steps and long-term goals is, as yet, far from complete and long overdue in both countries. For until and unless that creation happens, the danger is very real that one Donald. J. Trump presidency will be followed – not by the dawn of a new progressive era – but by a second Trump presidency, or by something worse! Donald J. Trump may not be the only morbid symptom we have yet to endure. But let us hope that he is – and let us call the Democratic Left to its epoch-making task!

The arguments developed here are explored further in David Coates (editor), Reflections on the Future of the Left,8 to be published in September in the UK by Agenda Publishing9 and in the US in November by Columbia University Press

6 Among the well-established are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown. Among the new-comers, Joe Kennedy III seems particularly active on progressive issues. For a fuller list, see https://cpc-grijalva.house.gov/caucus-members/

With the wisdom of hindsight, it is now clear that the sheer quality of the Obama intellect, and the solid integrity of his character, lulled many of those who twice voted for him into a false sense of security.

It was as though we forgot, with too great an ease and for too long a time, just how difficult and disappointing life becomes for progressive people in this country when both the White House and the Congress are in less intelligent, more conservative hands. We forgot that a President could embarrass us as well as inspire us; and that a Republican-controlled Congress, whose vitriol against Barack Obama had gridlocked Washington for more than half a decade, could very quickly move onto the offensive once the object of their vitriol had gone.

Well, that lulling is well and truly over. The inmates have totally taken over the asylum this time. We have a White House bereft of intelligence and character, and a Congress bereft of morality. There is no space for progressives to take a political nap now. We have serious things to do. The first is to develop mechanisms that equip us to cope with the horrors of one Trump tweet after another, and with a string of outrageously reactionary legislative proposals from the Republican majority in Congress that threaten to blow enormous holes in America’s already thread-bare welfare safety net. The second is to develop strategies that will equip us to replace Donald Trump with a president we can respect again, and to replace the current ultra-conservative Congress with one fully engaged with repairing the damage currently being done to the basic fabric of American society by Tea-Party inspired ideologues and the Alt-Right.

And in doing both those things, there may well be lessons to be learned from watching how progressive politics is currently being played out in the United Kingdom. There is a shared Anglo-American condition, after all – one that generated right-wing populism in both places ( a Donald J. Trump and a Nigel Farage) – but one that is being pushed back in the UK right now far more effectively than it is here in the United States.

I

American conservatives and British conservatives are not quite the same political animal. There is a venal quality in contemporary Republican ranks that, broadly speaking, the British Conservative Party lacks. There is no orchestrated Protestant evangelical crusade against abortion in the UK, as there is here; and no “Koch Brothers” equivalents. And where the Republican Party in the contemporary United States has attracted a strong libertarian presence into its rank and file, the British Conservative Party still has a streak of “one nation Toryism” within even its parliamentary ranks, a softer conservatism that Americans of a certain age would recognize as similar to an old-style liberal Republicanism – an Eisenhower Republicanism – that has now been largely expunged from the Party.

But for all their differences, both right-wing parties have of late tied their flags to very similar policies. Both are enthusiastic advocates of the austerity route to growth, arguing again for trickle-down economics just as George W. Bush did when heading the previous Republican Administration. Both are responding positively to an upsurge in right-wing populism that blames low standards of living for working families on the influx of refugees hitherto welcomed into the bottom of the labor markets of each economy in turn; and each are in consequence preaching a policy of withdrawal from long-established international treaties and overseas obligations. With Trump, the pitch was initially about the redundancy of NATO – that at least has now changed – replaced in the symbolic center of America’s new foreign policy by a rejection of the Paris climate accords. And, of course, the Administration is still committed to building a wall along the Mexican border for which somehow it will make Mexico pay. With Theresa May, the pitch is for a hard Brexit and a closing of the borders to EU-directed immigration flows: a severe severing of ties, that is, with both the institutions of the European Union and with its people. In both cases, we see ultra-conservative governments reconfiguring their international relationships behind a rhetoric that is heavy on nationalism, and full of the need to restore national sovereignty.

For over seven decades, the “free” world has been led – whether it wanted to be or not – by the United States and its leading European ally – the United Kingdom. Now, apparently, neither government seems to want to sustain that particular role. Unilateralism is suddenly the order of the day. The imperial mindset remains, and the armaments to implement it also remain intact – and are even poised to be inflated in the US case if the Trump first budget is any guide. But now Washington in a loud voice, and London more quietly, preach the virtues of an imperialism without responsibility – each making the case for putting their own narrowly-conceived national interests first, regardless of the international damage that might follow.

II

The two conservative governments also share one other thing. They are each led by individuals who are deeply unpopular in the wider electorate in each country, and increasingly unpopular within their own partisan ranks. Theresa May is certainly that – largely as the result of a misjudged snap general election in June that left her party without a governing majority, and did so in part because of her appallingly bad performance on the hustings. But Donald Trump is, on this as on so much else, so much bigger than Theresa May. Good though he was on the hustings, it is not just that his visits to countries abroad seems to generate mass protest on nearly every occasion. It is also that his incessant tweeting is widely recognized as demeaning to the office; and in certain hands, evidence too of his growing mental instability. Theresa May struggles daily now to avoid a palace coup that would see her replaced in power by one of her senior colleagues; but Donald Trump struggles with more – he struggles with the possibility of impeachment for corruption or removal of office for lack of mental capacity. There can be no guarantee that either of them will see out their full term, and a near certainty that Theresa May will not.

Her fragile hold on power – her fall from a 20-point lead in the opinion polls before the election to one of trailing by eight points in polls today – is not, however, just the product of personal leadership flaws. It is also the product of the principled and radical programmatic alternative presented to the UK electorate in June by a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, long hailed by some as the UK’s equivalent to Bernie Sanders.1 As we argued in an earlier posting,2 Labour eroded the Conservatives’ hold on power by going left, not by chasing the Tories through the centre and towards the right. Labour offered a solid critique of Tory austerity policies, of the kind made so effectively against the Republican Party by Bernie Sanders when campaigning for the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. Both Corbyn now, and Sanders then, spoke to a new generation of young voters frustrated by the options that the neoliberalism of free-market capitalism was giving them, and enthused by the progressive values (and personal humility) of the men themselves. They, as individuals – Corbyn and Sanders both – bridged a generational divide that neither the Blairites in the UK, nor the Clinton-centrists in the US could match; and in bridging it, opened the way for the return of progressive politics to power.

So, if the UK is any guide and if we want Trump and the Republicans gone, the line of political march that we need to adopt is clear. No temporizing with reaction. No fantasizing about recapturing the center if only we practice moderation, in the manner of Mark Penn and Andrew Stein.3 Rather, we need to tell it as it is, make a total clean break with the moderate economic and social policies associated with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, and go for an entirely new social settlement based on the principles of justice, fairness and equality. We, not Trump, need to drain the Washington swamp; and the decent way to do it – first in 2018 and then in 2020 – is to fill Washington with a new generation of radical progressive legislators – people beholden to no-one and no-thing except the program on which they ran. It has happened before. It happened in 1936, and again in 1964. It is time to bring the progressive left to power for a third iteration. The fit between what the economy needs, the society wants, and radicals now offer has never been closer. It is time to make the years of Donald Trump‘s presidency simply the dark night before the dawn of a new and progressive morning.

The arguments developed here are explored further in David Coates (editor), Reflections on the Future of the Left,4 to be published in September in the UK by Agenda Publishing5 and in the US in November by Columbia University Press